A Long Strange Trip (14 page)

Part of that liftoff was the act of playing together night after night, learning how to stretch out tunes because, in Weir’s words, “we weren’t done playing, but the tune was over.” The folk world they’d mostly emerged from treated performance as a recital. Their decision to play improvisationally was never consciously discussed, and was an ingrained fact long before they stopped to think about it. But as soon as they began to play, the idea of opening up the music to variation became essential. There were various sources for the impulse. For Garcia, one prized example was a night he’d seen Scotty Stoneman play. Despite the traditional formal rigidity of bluegrass, on this night Stoneman began to play, Garcia said, in “longer and longer phrases, ten bars, fourteen bars, seventeen bars—and the guys in the band are just watching him! They’re barely playing, going ding-ding-ding, while he’s burning.” They stretched the tune to twenty minutes, “unheard of in bluegrass.” “It was like those incredible excursions that Coltrane and those guys took, where all of a sudden you’re hearing traffic on the streets . . . with Scotty it was diesel trucks and the highway. It was all there. And burnin’, like a forest fire . . . Instead of playing the tune he would play some crazed idea that stretched clear across it . . . [He was the] model of the demon fiddler, the guy that has hell snapping at his heels, he was playing to save his soul . . . That’s the first time I had the experience of being high, getting high from him, going away from it like ‘what happened?’ and just standing there clapping till my hands were sore.”

For most of the Warlocks, the man who taught them how to improvise was John Coltrane. The great tenor player had entered the jazz world after World War II, and until the mid-1950s was only a competent sideman. Then he worked with the great composer of postwar jazz Thelonious Monk, and something emerged in his playing and composition that was so profound he became a fundamental influence, “one of the reasons,” wrote Leroi Jones, “that suicide seems so boring.” Phil Lesh had observed that transition in the San Francisco jazz clubs Coltrane had played in the late fifties—one of the special moments of his life was shaking Coltrane’s hand after seeing him play with the Miles Davis Quintet—and heard it in the albums
My Favorite Things, Africa/Brass,
and
A Love Supreme.
So had Garcia. The guitarist and the bassist were instantly at one in an essential vision of how to play, and from the beginning, they taught Trane’s lessons to their bandmates. “It was the simplest thing to do,” said Lesh, “because you didn’t have to remember any chords.” Or, as the student Weir put it, “The first thing we learned was to rattle on in one chord change for a while, until we were done punching it around. That was good for me, because I didn’t know many chords.” Lesh introduced Kreutzmann to the work of Coltrane’s great drummer, Elvin Jones, and Bill’s world expanded mightily. Further, Coltrane’s band worked up a collective improvisational approach, with every musician improvising, not just the soloist. His influence on the Warlocks was omnipresent and permanent. Interestingly, that same fall John Coltrane experienced LSD and came to very similar conclusions about it as had the Warlocks. But that was only an addendum. No rock band in that era or after would take the lessons of John Coltrane more to the soul of their playing than the Warlocks.

There were, of course, many other influences. One that Garcia would cite was a Junior Walker instrumental called “Cleo’s Back.” “There was something about the way the instruments entered into it in a kind of free-for-all way, and there were little holes and these neat details in it—we studied that motherfucker. We might have even played it for a while, but that wasn’t the point—it was the conversational approach, the way the band worked, that really influenced us.”

As their music grew more bizarre to the average listener, the atmosphere of the In Room followed suit. “We were a bar band with abnormal features,” said Weir, and there among the stewardesses would appear people with orange hair and feathers, or Page Browning, of the Chateau gang, with face putty and paint distorting his ears, chin, and nose. The Warlocks began to write their first song, and it was definitely not “Satisfaction.” The In Room was located quite near the railroad tracks that run up the Peninsula to San Francisco, and as the band grew more and more attuned to the schedule, they learned to play with, instead of against, the sound of the trains as they rumbled by. One day, going from somewhere to somewhere, they heard the Them song “Mystic Eyes” on the car radio, and a fragment germinated in their minds. Eventually, they locked it into the sound of the trains, and “Caution: Do Not Stop on the Tracks” was born. It was a long, modal ramble, really only an excuse to jam, with a fragmentary, half-improvised lyric by Pigpen about “the gypsy woman.” It was not In Room material. By the end of October, it became clear that the In Room could get along without them and vice versa, and they brought the run to a close. As they packed their gear into the Pontiac on the last night, the manager offered them a consensus professional critique of their act: “You guys will never make it. You’re too weird.”

On October 16, two weeks before the Warlocks’ departure from the In Room, the future of rock and roll presentation had appeared in San Francisco. Produced by the Family Dog, “A Tribute to Dr. Strange” was the first adult rock dance, and it featured the Charlatans, the Jefferson Airplane, the Great Society, and the Marbles at Longshoremen’s Hall. The roots of the Family Dog, which established dancing as the medium for music presentation over the rest of the decade, lay in a peculiar institution called the Red Dog Saloon. Early in 1965, at a cabin in the Sierra Nevada called the Zen Mine, while playing the board game Risk high on LSD, Mark Unobsky, Don Works, and Chandler “Chan” Laughlin, the former manager of the Cabale folk club, conceived the idea of a rock and roll club in the old mining town and now tourist destination of Virginia City, Nevada. It would be called the Red Dog Saloon. They imported some Beat Sausalito carpenters and began to patch up an abandoned building. Chan went to San Francisco to buy pot and whorehouse red velvet drapes, and to inveigle his friend Luria Castell and another friend to join them as go-go dancers.

Virginia City sits on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, and from the wooden boardwalk in front of the Red Dog, one can see a hundred miles across Nevada. The combination of cowboy atmosphere and LSD made it a special theater. “We were the bad guys’ saloon down at the end of the street,” reflected Laughlin. “The ground rules were that from the time your feet hit the floor in the morning, you’re in a grade B movie— play it! And it worked.” On opening night, June 29, 1965, the sheriff stopped by, handed his gun to the bartender, and said, “Check my gun.” The bartender fired a round into the floor and handed it back. “Works fine, Sheriff.” Everyone carried guns, including the lead waitress, imported from a strip club on Broadway in San Francisco, who had a Walther PPK in a black leather thigh holster over her net stockings. And everyone lived in the combination of cowboy and Victorian dress that the Charlatans embodied. But they were cowboys on acid, and the Red Dog included an early light show created by San Franciscans Bill Ham and Bob Cohen, a light box that changed with the music.

In the course of the spring, a friend had played Unobsky a tape of a band that had formed around George Hunter, a hanger-on at San Francisco State who worked with electronic scores. Although he could not really play an instrument, George had an amazing sense of style, and in his long hair and Beatle boots, he thoroughly looked the part of a musician. It was generally true that the Charlatans were longer on style than musical skill—Laughlin said that George “got them together and started taking pictures. They never actually rehearsed as an entire band until the day they arrived up here,” an understandable if not entirely correct assertion. Thus they were Charlatans. But the psychedelic theater that was the Red Dog took care of that. More an impresario than a musician, Hunter had gathered up Mike Ferguson, who’d created the Magic Theater for Madmen Only on Divisadero Street in San Francisco. The name was taken from Hermann Hesse’s
Steppenwolf,
but the enterprise was actually a combination art gallery and small store that sold Victoriana, rolling papers, pipes, and, if you looked cool, pot. Ferguson’s sense of style coalesced with Hunter’s, and the result was the Victorian look of things that came pouring out of San Francisco attics. With Hunter on autoharp and Ferguson on piano, they added Dan Hicks on drums, Mike Wilhelm on guitar, and Richie Olsen on bass, played an energized, improvisatory electric folk music, and began a most delightful summer.

When the people who’d enjoyed the scene at the Red Dog returned to San Francisco in the fall, they found that they did not dig what they termed the “plastic” bars on Broadway where the Byrds and the Spoonful had recently played, and wanted to support their friends the Charlatans. They decided to throw a dance. The prime mover was Luria Castell, a political science major at S.F. State, a HUAC protester, Fair Play for Cuba committee member, and a onetime organizer for the W. E. B. Du Bois Club. She also loved to dance. With her housemates Alton Kelley, his lover, Ellen Harmon, and Jack Towle, they decided to name their little production company in tribute to Ellen’s recently deceased dog, Animal. Luria was the mouthpiece; Jack took care of the money; Ellen stayed home, read comic books, and answered the phone; and Kelley did the posters. Through Luria’s radical connections they found a union hall near Fisherman’s Wharf and began. They were serious about things, if not themselves. “Not only did we want to have a good time, we felt a potential,” said Luria later, “a positive change in the human condition . . . almost a religious kind of thing, but not dogma, unlocking that tension and letting it come out in a positive way with the simple health of dancing and getting crazy once a month or so.” These earliest hippies lived a fairly austere life in cheap buildings, with cheap clothes. They had no holy men, philosophies, or politics, said Kelley, they just wanted a good time. They visited Ralph Gleason, and he faithfully reported their goal: “San Francisco can be the American Liverpool,” said Luria. It was a “pleasure city,” unlike the too-large New York and the “super-uptite plastic” Los Angeles.

It was an era of parties, and they were about to get bigger. By now, students at S.F. State had moved into the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, and there were a dozen parties every Friday and Saturday night. One regular site was a large rooming house at 1090 Page Street, where an antiques and pot dealer and Lemar (“legalize marijuana”) activist named Chet Helms had lovingly eyed the rosewood-paneled ballroom in the basement and decided it would be a great place to have parties and jam sessions. The building manager was Rodney Albin, their old friend from the Boar’s Head and now a student at S.F. State, and he thought it a fine idea. The door charge was fifty cents.

The Gleason article, some posters tacked up around the old beatnik neighborhood of North Beach, the Haight-Ashbury, and at the Matrix, and a few ads on the Top 40 station KYA were enough to sell out the October 16 show at Longshoremen’s Hall, a concrete hexagon that resembled an umbrella, where Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, and Ray Charles had all played. The Dog didn’t bother with city permits, but they certainly brought together a community. At the Stones’ show that summer, the older members of the audience didn’t really know each other, said Tom Donahue, a KYA disc jockey. Now they did, and the dance was informed by a collective shock of recognition, as hundreds of slightly longhaired freaks in thrift-shop clothing styles that ranged, as Gleason put it, “from velvet Lotta Crabtree to Mining Camp Desperado, Jean Laffite leotards, I. Magnin beatnik, Riverboat Gambler, India Import Exotic, [to] Modified Motorcycle Racer,” their eyes shining with the light of LSD, converged on the hall. “They can’t bust us all,” thought Chet Helms. The sound was terrible and Bill Ham’s light show was still primitive, but it was a marvelous night.

The Charlatans and the Airplane were already stars in the small world of San Francisco, and they were joined by the Great Society. Formed by a guitarist, Darby Slick, his film student brother, Jerry, and Jerry’s wife, Grace, after seeing an Airplane show at the Matrix, the Great Society had played in public for the first time the day before, October 15. That night at the Longshoremen’s Hall, the seeds of yet another band would germinate as a guitarist from Marin County, John Cipollina, met some out-of-towners named Greg Elmore and Gary Duncan. In a while, they would be the Quicksilver Messenger Service. The next day, on the afternoon of October 16, the Instant Action Jug Band performed for the first time, part of anti–Vietnam War demonstrations in Berkeley, leading the demonstrators from a flatbed truck in the chant “1-2-3, what are we fightin’ for?” Of that band, Country Joe McDonald and Barry “the Fish” Melton were both red diaper children of left-wingers, and their activist politics were much more Berkeley than San Francisco, but they were definitely imbibing the spirit of rock and roll. The missing element from the first night at Longshoremen’s Hall was the Warlocks, either as audience members or as performers. They’d auditioned for Alton Kelley and Ellen Harmon at the In Room, but their lack of original material identified them as a mere cover band, and they were rejected.

Being at liberty from the In Room had certain rewards. Saturday, October 30, was a beautiful day, as Indian-summer days in San Francisco tend to be, and the Warlocks went off to Marin County, just north of the city, to drop acid and enjoy themselves. On the road to Fairfax, a little town on the border between eastern, urbanized Marin and its rural western reaches, they fell in behind a gasoline tank truck with a damaged transmission that made the most remarkable sound. Lesh was in good form that day, and the sound sang to him. “It was in phase,” he said, “the real sound, and I fell in love with a broken transmission.” He was riding shotgun in the front car, owned by Sue Swanson and nicknamed George, and leaned out of the car window listening to the sound modulate his brain waves, pointing at the truck and generally being transfixed. “There’s more going on than we even suspected,” they thought, even in truck transmissions. It was, Garcia said later, the first psychedelic music he’d heard, even if it was not precisely music. Later that fall they’d be larking about in Los Trancos Woods as a jet passed overhead and split the universe with a “cataclysmic” sound. Garcia would try to make his guitar sound like a jet engine for a good while. But on October 30, still quite high, they came into the city, stopped for burgers at a good dive called Clown Alley, and headed over to the Longshoremen’s Hall to see the second Family Dog show, “A Tribute to Sparkle Plenty,” with the Loving Spoonful and the Charlatans. Weird people and strange rock and roll— just what they wanted. Metaphorically frothing at the mouth in glee, Lesh recognized Luria Castell and stopped her. “Lady, what this little séance needs is us.” Quite so. Later, Chet Helms would see Garcia and remark, “This is great. Every hippie in town is here tonight, in drag.” And Garcia thought, “Right on, this
is
a hell of a trip.” It was the first time that LSD and music had mixed appropriately for them.